


Living Room, NY

by Pseudologia



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: M/M, everything is the same except hopper never "died"
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-09-02
Updated: 2019-09-07
Packaged: 2020-10-05 10:56:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 10,746
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20487755
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pseudologia/pseuds/Pseudologia
Summary: Will has been dying to visit Jonathan at NYU, and Mike’s mom won’t rest until he visits Nancy at Barnard, so it only makes sense that they make the trip together.or: The One With New York City, Sibling Counsel, Teenage Wistfulness, and Realizing Things.





	1. lovesong

Will has been dying to visit Jonathan at NYU, and Mike’s mom won’t rest until he visits Nancy at Barnard, so it only makes sense that they make the trip together. Will spends the summer between their freshman and sophomore years of high school working odd jobs — pulling weeds, babysitting, painting faces at the fair — until he finally saves up enough for round-trip Greyhound tickets. (Mike, for his part, persistently offers to have his mom pay for both of them until Will finally shouts him down, and then they show up at school the next day and pretend the fight never happened.)

Eventually, their tickets are bought and booked for November.

“What’re you gonna do while you’re there?” Dustin interrogates them from across the lunch table, a small pyramid of pudding cups discarded to his left.

They glance at each other and shrug. “Just visit, mostly,” Will offers.

“Right, but visit _ what_?” Dustin needles. “The Empire State Building? The Twin Towers? The Chrysler Building?”

“Dude, those are all, like, buildings,” Mike deadpans. “We’re not there to visit _ buildings_. We’re going to be on college campuses. _ College campuses_. It’s going to be like, you know —”

“Babe central,” Lucas finishes for him, halfway through a bite of turkey sandwich. Max whomps him over the head.

“Yes, _ thank you_, Lucas,” Mike says, gesturing to the other boy with his palm up. “I’m visiting my sister at a _ women’s college_. I’m not exactly trying to tour the Statue of Liberty.”

“Well, cool, this has been fun,” Max snaps, tossing all of her trash onto her tray and getting up from the table. “But I’m gonna go seriously interrogate my life choices.”

“Babe,” Lucas calls after her, turning to the rest of the boys to roll his eyes. “_Max__.” _

Max turns for a moment, but doesn’t stop walking away. “Call me when you stop perceiving women as blank slates awaiting your objectification!”

Lucas slumps against the table. “I can’t believe her mom bought her a subscription to _ Ms. _ last year.”

Will shrugs. “She’s not wrong,” he pipes up, taking a sip of orange juice. 

The rest of the Party eyes him scornfully.

“Look, it’s gonna be the first time any of us has ever visited New York City!” Will exclaims. “There are girls no matter _ where _ you go.”

Everyone else shrugs, quietly dropping the point. None of them are eager to rehash the old fight they’d had the previous summer, when Will had been unable to understand why they all cared about their respective girlfriends so much. Even Dustin had never been completely filled in, though he knew that it made things stilted and weird between Lucas and Will and Mike — _ especially _Will and Mike — for weeks, even after the Mind Flayer had finally been slain.

Lucas, Mike, and Dustin had briefly discussed it amongst themselves a few times since, and all come to the consensus that Will was just lagging behind them a bit. He’d see things their way soon enough.

“So how long is the bus ride?” Dustin tries, for a change of subject.

—

The ride ends up clocking in around 20 hours, stretched across two days. Will and Mike make it through an entire backstock of comic books, play 27 games of travel Scrabble (of which Mike wins 18) and 14 games of Spit (of which Will wins 14). They sleep fitfully, Mike’s head against the window and Will’s head against Mike’s shoulder, a tenuous operation that crumbles every time the bus hits a major pothole and sends Mike’s skull colliding with the glass. They make up for the lost hours of sleep with Hershey bars and too many gas station Cokes, and finally emerge into the Port Authority Bus Terminal simultaneously alert and exhausted, their senses sanded over by the soft pull of fatigue.

Which is probably why Mike says, “Woah, what the fuck?” a little too loudly when he sees Nancy and Jonathan waiting to receive them both outside the bus terminal.

Nancy and Jonathan had weathered a bad breakup six months ago, at the tail end of their freshman years of college. Neither Mike nor Will knew many details, aside from the fact that Nancy spent most of that winter break in her room, and that Jonathan became even more withdrawn than usual. Eventually that summer, over one melancholy dinner, Jonathan had told Joyce and Will that the two of them had been unable to weather the change. Still, it was a little hard for anybody back in Hawkins to believe that the couple, who had gone through so much together and united despite such opposite backgrounds, were actually splitting up for good.

Yet here they were, six months later, standing noticeably far apart and looking at the floor as they waited to receive their kid brothers.

“Yikes,” Will whispers, shooting a playful grimace at Mike, who snorts in return. Still, he breaks into a beaming grin and calls out, “Jonathan!” with more excitement than his current energy levels should allow.

“Will!” Jonathan responds, a twin smile lighting up his typically morose features. He stretches out his arms and Will runs into them, nearly bringing his brother down with his newfound teenage gangliness. They’re basically the same height now, and Mike blinks, because when did that happen?

Probably around the same time he grew taller than Nancy, he muses. Mike strides up to her and chucks his chin up. “Hey.”

Nancy and Will roll their eyes with eerie synchronicity. “Just hug me, moron,” Nancy drawls, and Mike obliges. Enjoys it, even.

“All right, well,” Jonathan mutters. “Uh, I guess we should probably split up. Let you guys get settled.”

“Where are we going again?” Will asks, as they tote their luggage toward the bus station exit.

“The Village,” Jonathan answers. “My dorm is right on Washington Square Park.”

“And we’ll be closer to Midtown, by the Flatiron,” Nancy tells Mike, the unspoken _ because our grandmother owns an apartment there that she’s letting me occupy rent-free _wavering in the air. One of Jonathan’s eyebrows twitches just a bit.

“When do we go to Barnard?” Mike asks.

“There’s a party thing up closer to campus tomorrow, if you want to —” Nancy starts.

“Yeah, yes, definitely, I definitely want to go,” Mike finishes for her. He turns to Will, who turns to Jonathan.

“It’s your trip,” Jonathan says with a shrug.

“We can meet up tomorrow?” Will suggests to Mike, who nods eagerly, his fists clenched in excitement.

“Cool, well.” Nancy stops in front of the subway entrance. “Guess we’re uptown and you’re downtown.”

Jonathan’s eyebrows shoot up his forehead.

“No, I mean —” Nancy scrambles.

“Yeah,” Jonathan says. “It’s fine.” He turns Will toward the opposite staircase. 

Will catches Mike’s eye before they part completely, mouthing another _ YIKES! _

Mike laughs, saluting Will with two fingers. “See you later, good William.”

Will nods solemnly. “Until then, Michael.”

They descend their respective staircases. Mike starts humming Billy Joel’s “Uptown Girl,” and Nancy tries to trip him on purpose.

—

“I can’t believe Mom let you do this, by the way,” Jonathan says as Will sets his worn duffel bag down on the floor underneath Jonathan’s lofted bed. The dorm room is easily half as small as Will’s minuscule room back home, with Jonathan’s half littered with thumbtack holes and band fliers and photos. His roommate’s side sports a lot of sports paraphernalia. Not a good sign.

“Yeah, well,” Will shrugs, “I’ve been begging for like, a year and a half. And she’s a lot happier now that she’s with, uh, you know, so.”

“You Know” also occasionally went by the name “Jim Hopper.” Jonathan and Will were happy for their mom, but still. It was a little weird. It would always be a little weird.

“Oh, yeah, how is that?” Jonathan asks, sitting backwards on his rickety rolling desk chair.

Will nods his head side to side as he unpacks his clothes, gently settling them on top of Jonathan’s dresser. “I don’t know. They’re great, I mean. Mom seems really happy. But it’s a little difficult for me to navigate, I guess, especially since Mike and El broke up a few months ago.”

“Hmm,” Jonathan nods. “Man, I’d forgotten about that.”

Will had let Jonathan in on their friend group drama over countless phone calls, with Mike and El’s breakup topping the list of major developments. They’d been growing apart for a while, ever since the Mind Flayer finally died, but still. The permanent break — _ For real this time _, as Mike had despondently phrased it — jarred their group considerably. Max and Mike were still barely on speaking terms, and Dustin, Lucas and Will had bonded repeatedly over how difficult it was to remain neutral.

Will laughs. “God, I wish I could forget about it.”

Jonathan looks at him, considering something. “The breakup, you mean." 

Will flinches a little, browns knit in confusion. “What else would I mean?”

Jonathan shrugs, spinning his chair around in a full circle, his eyes conspicuously glued to the ceiling. “Why did they even break up, do you know?”

Will huffs. “I dunno. Mike said it just kind of happened. After a while, it just didn’t feel good anymore, or something like that. I don’t know.”

Jonathan nods, and Will looks at him.

“Why, is that what happened with you and Nancy?”

Jonathan raises his eyebrows. “Touché.”

He gets up and shuffles to the bathroom, murmuring something to Will about taking a shower before bed.

—

“Okay, so there are, like, _ zero _ babes in the Flatiron district,” Mike declares, collapsing onto the couch in Nancy’s apartment. “Noted.” 

Nancy smacks one of the feet he’s draped over the arm of the couch. “Jesus, Mike, you’re so corny. And take your shoes off.”

Mike sneers and bobs his head back and forth, a leftover gesture from over five years ago, when he would repeat Nancy’s demands back to her in a high-pitched voice. He uses his feet to pop both of his shoes off, though.

Mike pushes his mop of hair back. “So you and Jonathan hate each other now, huh?”

He can practically hear the eye roll from Nancy’s room, where she’s likely removing her own shoes. There’s a quiet _ splish _as she sits down on her waterbed.

“No, we don’t _ hate each other_,” she explains. “But that’s the first time we’ve seen each other since the breakup, so. It was bound to be awkward.”

“And awkward it was!” Mike calls into the other room, straining to shove the coffee table out of the way so that he can pull out the couch. “Awkward it was.”

“Yeah, well, when Hopper lets El out of the house again, you’ll see.”

Mike frowns, tearing the throw pillows off of the couch and removing each of its peach-pink cushions. “I hope not.”

Nancy ambles back into the living room, a piece of white mint floss darting between her teeth. “Yeah, well, breakups are awkward, no matter what.” She stops short at the sight of the discarded pillows, Mike confusedly clawing at the cloth of the sofa. “Mike, what the hell are you doing?”

Mike grunts. “Trying to pull out the futon, obviously.”

Nancy snorts. “I have a Murphy bed, not a _ futon. _” She says “futon” like others might say “hemorrhoids." 

Nancy glides over to the other side of the room and pulls down on the handles of what Mike thought was a closet. A posh little bed swings out, already fully made.

—

Jonathan and Will grab breakfast sandwiches at the bodega around the corner before climbing back on the subway. On their way there, Jonathan points out the awning of the Waverly Theater.

“I’m gonna take you there tomorrow night, okay?” he tells Will. “They do this special screening, I think you’ll be really into it.”

Will grins. “Okay.”

After a long commute across from a very vocal Jehovah’s Witness, they disembark a few blocks away from the Museum of Modern Art.

“When is Mike meeting us, again?” Jonathan asks, showing his student ID for a pair of discounted tickets.

“Like eleven,” Will answers, accepting his own ticket with a _ Thanks _. “He told me to” — Will breaks out the air quotes — “‘get through all the boring crap,’ and then he’d meet me by the cafe.”

Jonathan laughs. “Yeah, that sounds about right.”

They start at the top floor, intending to work their way down. Will takes in each piece for at least two minutes, instantly verklempt at the chance to see so many works he thought he’d never see in person. 

“I mean, this is a Matisse,” he whispers in front of [ _ View of Notre-Dame_](https://www.moma.org/collection/works/78863). “Like, a _ real _Matisse.”

Jonathan rubs his shoulder. “I know, buddy.”

Will sits in the middle of the galleries and sketches — people, paintings, everything, desperate to hold on to his memories of this day forever. Jonathan affectionately tells him that he’s going to go on ahead, after it takes them nearly an hour to get through one room. Will nods, his Derwent 6H still flying over the page. When he’s done filling in the shine on a security guard’s shoe, he checks his watch, and — it’s 11:04.

He almost forgot about Mike.

Mike sits at a cafe table nursing a black tea, the creases under his eyes slightly more pronounced.

“This city is loud,” he gripes. “I barely got any sleep." 

Will snorts. “Yeah, good to see you, too.”

Mike rolls his eyes. “We’ve been apart for, like, _ fifteen hours_,” he scoffs, but he pulls Will into a hug anyway. Will scrunches his nose in amusement and confusion. Mike smells like Nancy’s room used to: potpourri and petunia shampoo.

“All right,” Mike says, clapping Will on the back. “You get past all the old crap yet?”

“I have gotten through exactly one room,” Will laughs.

Mike groans, but throws an arm across Will’s shoulders and marches them out of the cafe. “Man, the things I do for you, Byers.”

“Yeah, you’re truly a saint.”

Mike stays surprisingly un-annoying during their walk through the galleries. He doesn’t pace or fidget as he waits for Will to observe and read and sketch. He doesn’t whistle or, thank God, touch anything. He only gets one threatening yelp from security, when he gets practically nose-to-canvas with a Cézanne. 

On the next floor down, Mike pauses for a while in front of Giorgio de Chirico’s [_The Song of Love_](https://www.moma.org/collection/works/80419). Will watches him, quietly sketching his mop of black hair, now long enough to tuck behind his ears. His sharp elbows, protruding as he regards the painting with arms crossed. A lumpy red sweater swallows his torso, gaping a bit around the neck to reveal a black crewneck T-shirt. His jeans are at least three inches too short.

They’re like that for a while, and Will feels an insane burble of happiness rise up through him, like he just won a bike race or aced a critical roll.

Will closes his sketchbook and stands next to him, hands in pockets. “Earth to Mike,” he whispers. “Come in, Mike.”

Mike turns to him with a small smile. “I really like this one.”

Will laughs. “Yeah, I could’ve guessed.” He tilts his head. “What do you like about it?”

Mike mimicks the head tilt with a _ hmmm_, takes the painting in again. “I don’t know,” he says. “It’s really beautiful, but also really, I guess, desolate? And then the name…” he shakes his head. “I think it makes me feel really sad. But, like, in a good way, if that makes sense.”

Will nods. “Yeah.” Because, weirdly, it does. He stares at the hollow eyes of the marble head that dominates the left of the frame, the empty pink glove next to it. It’s very beautiful, but very wistful, like an homage to a feeling he doesn’t know how to identify yet.

Mike still stares ahead. “I think it’s supposed to be about, like, how love can be really amazing, but it can also make you feel really alone.”

Will blinks, thrown as much by Mike’s sincerity as he is by the way his words settle beneath his ribcage, twisting uncomfortably. Because Will is pretty sure he’s never been in love, but he also knows he feels those words to be profoundly, painfully true.

“Anyway,” Mike shrugs, turning away from the painting. “I guess you win. I guess I like art museums now.”

Will chuckles. “Oh, thank God. Our friendship can continue.” And a fuzzy wave of relief that has nothing to do with the joke seems to roil between them, like a blast of summer humidity after a day spent too long indoors.

The thing is, Mike and Will have rarely been alone for the last year or two. It wasn’t a conscious decision on either of their parts, but Mike had obviously spent most of his one-on-one time with his girlfriend, and Will had been pretty eager to stick to group activities after his and Mike’s blowout fight in the Wheelers’ garage. With all the Mind Flayer chaos that had ensued shortly after, he and Mike had never really resolved the issue — as Mike so eloquently put it, Will “not liking girls” — which suited Will just fine. He was a natural conflict-avoider, and he wasn’t eager to interrogate why he was so annoyed by that exact phrasing.

So it’s nice that they can hang out again, and things can still be so normal. And Will can pretty much ignore the weird feeling gnawing at the back of his brain. 

They start to walk toward the next room, and Mike gestures at Will’s sketchbook. “It’s actually, like, really fun, you know? Being able to see you in your element.”

Will answers with a noncommittal hum before zeroing in on a Magritte, his palms weirdly sweaty as he jots the title down.

—

They reunite with Jonathan in the lobby, then trail him to a packed-to-the-gills record store, where the Byers brothers gush over vinyl. Will goes glassy-eyed over a like-new copy of The Cure’s _ Boys Don’t Cry_, and Mike buys it for him before Will can even really say no. Will clutches the pink album to his chest, beaming, and Jonathan elbows him with a smile, making him promise he’ll let him borrow it whenever he’s home.

On their way back toward the subway after lunch, Will ducks into a phone booth to check in with Joyce, leaving Jonathan and Mike leaning against some snooty shoe store, their eyes equally protective on Will despite him being in a clear glass box some five feet away.

“That was nice of you, by the way,” Jonathan says, gesturing at the bagged album hanging off of Mike’s left wrist. “He fucking loves The Cure.”

Mike smiles. “Yeah, I know. Almost as much as The Clash.”

They sit in companionable silence for a bit and watch Will talk to Joyce. He’d finally upgraded from his signature bowl cut that summer, and he runs his hand along the newly shaved back of his neck as he talks. After a second, he catches them watching him and shoots them both a wave, which they simultaneously return.

Jonathan grins at the phone booth before his features settle into a more contemplative expression. He turns to Mike again, his voice characteristically soft as he asks, “You’re like, his favorite person. You know that, right?”

Mike looks at him like he just spoke Telerin. “Uh, yeah, no, I don’t think so,” he says, shaking his head. “You and your mom, I mean, you guys are everything to him.”

“Hmm.” Jonathan smiles. “Outside of the family, then.” 

Mike sputters. “I mean, even then there’s still Dustin and Lucas and —”

“Mike,” Jonathan cuts him off. “Trust me on this.” 

Will hangs up and exits the phone booth, and Jonathan pushes himself away from the wall. Mike takes a second, his brow furrowed, before he shakes off the bizarre exchange and follows the brown-haired boys on their way to the subway.

Jonathan leaves them in Flatiron and then darts off, clearly eager to avoid another run-in with Nancy. The boys snigger over this for a minute, until they look up and Mike reveals that he has no goddamn idea where they are. They end up calling Nancy, who peevishly informs them that they are directly across the street.

“I am clearly not cut out for city life,” Mike says as they stride into the lobby of Nancy’s building.

They have a few hours before the Barnard party, which, Nancy explains, is okay, because she has some people coming over to pre-game anyway. Will and Mike have the good sense not to ask what pre-gaming is.

—

Pre-gaming, it turns out, means drinking before going to a party, where you are also expected to drink. Mike and Will have had three beers and one glass of wine between the two of them in their entire lives, and they’re quickly thrown into a clash of wanting to seem cool versus silently freaking out. Mike blithely takes a beer from one of Nancy’s friends, some Columbia guy who looks like David Hasselhoff, which he then puzzles over how to open for five solid minutes. 

When Hasselhoff hands Will a Miller Lite, he grips it nervously and nods his thanks, making no obvious move to open it.

“You okay?” Mike asks, once the Columbia guy has moved on to the living room.

Will shrugs. “What am I supposed to say, ‘Sorry, no thanks, I have a family history of alcoholism’?”

“You don’t have to drink if you don’t want to.” Mike levels him with a serious look, his voice low.

Will grimaces. “I know. You don’t have to do that.”

“Do what?”

Will picks at the label on his bottle. “Protect me.”

Mike scrunches his eyebrows, like Will just told him he had suddenly become a huge fan of Loggins & Messina.

“Uh, yeah,” he says. “I do.”

Will rolls his eyes and looks at the tile of the kitchen floor, twisting the top off of his bottle with a hiss.

“How did you know to _ do _that?!” Mike yelps indignantly. Will smirks and doesn’t answer, because the truth — that he’d had to do it for Lonnie all the time back in elementary school — isn’t nearly as fun as the nonplussed grimace coloring Mike’s face.

After about an hour and a game of Kings, Mike and Will settle into their respective buzzes and begin to loosen up. Nancy’s room fills with an eclectic mixture of students, and Will ends up gushing about the MoMA with some girl in a beret for most of their time there. Mike flits around, joining and dropping a few conversations and generally enjoying his notoriety as Nancy’s Kid Brother, all the while keeping an eye on Will. His cheeks are pink with tipsiness and a grin splits his face as he gestures emphatically, describing what it’s like to see an original Warhol in minute detail.

Mike can’t help but grin, too, whenever he catches a glimpse of Will. It feels _ so nice _ to see him so happy after everything. Like, _ so nice_.

“Yeah, okay, bud,” Nancy laughs, because apparently Mike has been expressing these ideas out loud. “How many beers deep are you? One?”

“Two and a half,” Mike shoots back. It is not as scathing a slam as he intended. The girls standing with Nancy snicker behind their hands.

They all show up to Barnard sloppy. The girl sitting next to Will on the subway pukes, causing him to lean hard against Mike. Mike laughs, clapping a hand across Will’s shoulder, then groans and pulls him in a little closer when he’s finally hit with the smell.

It’s definitely not the kind of college party they’d grown to expect from movies. Students mill around a basement room in varying stages of intoxication. Little packs of them occasionally loudly complain about the music or try to stake out a dancefloor, but for the most part it’s a macrocosm of Nancy’s apartment — little cliques of people yammering on about film theory or biochem or field hockey.

The girl who’d listened to Will’s MoMA exaltations finds him again, leaning further and further into his space as the night wears on. Mike watches them, brow furrowed, and tries to will his own rapt college girl into existence. There are plenty of beautiful women there, but they are, naturally, not lining up to mack on his skinny, sixteen-year-old self. Mike ambles over to a trio of girls and inserts himself into their conversation. They weather the intrusion gracefully enough, though Mike quickly finds himself in the weeds, because he knows next to nothing about the gender politics of the French Revolution.

Across the room, MoMA Girl whispers something into Will’s ear, and he tenses and widens his eyes, shifting his body weight back ever-so-slightly. He lets out a weird laugh and says something in return, and Mike is suddenly hit by a forceful wave of indignance because _he_ _wants to hear what they are saying_. Drunkenness doubling his already high propensity for impulsiveness, he finds himself crossing the room in a few long-legged strides. Will’s greenish eyes widen even further upon his approach, a tick that Mike blearily struggles to interpret: relief? Desperation? Annoyance at the interruption?

“Mike!” Will chirps through a flat smile. MoMA Girl narrows her eyes at Mike, clearly desperate for him to buzz off.

“Sorry to interrupt,” Mike says, the end of his sentence ticking up like a question. “I was just going to grab some air, and I dunno, I wanted to —”

Will nods more vigorously than is appropriate. “Air sounds good.”

MoMA Girl opens her mouth, almost certainly gathering the oxygen necessary to invite herself outside, but Will barrels on before she gets a chance, uncharacteristically loose-lipped after barely more than a beer. “I actually need to talk to Mike about something, um, private, but I’ll be back?”

Will grabs Mike’s arm and steers them to the stairs, pitching his practically full beer into a trash can on the way. The dorm building empties out onto a sprawling lawn, an unexpected square of green with a twin buildingless gap in the sky. Mike pitches himself onto the grass and looks up, expecting stars. The one or two faded novas blinking back at him, coupled with the far-off whine of sirens, starkly remind him where they are.

Will settles down next to him, resting arms on knees. “Thanks,” he says.

Mike turns his head to look at him, mostly getting an eyeful of manicured lawn and the waistline of Will’s washed-out jeans. “So you weren’t into that, huh.”

Will huffs out a laugh. “No. I wasn’t.”

“What was wrong with her?”

A sigh. “Nothing was _ wrong _with her. But she made a pass at me and I wasn’t, like, you know. I didn’t want to.”

A tiny headache blooms at the base of Mike’s skull, _ She made a pass at me _reverberating around in there like a sharp-sided die. He scratches at the back of his head.

“You didn’t want to what?”

Will shrugs. “Go outside with her, go to her room with her, be alone with her.” He brushes something off of his shoe. “It wasn’t like, specific.”

“Why not?”

“Why didn’t I want to be alone with her?”

Mike hums affirmatively.

Will sits there, eyes still firmly on his shoes. He clears his throat and tries to laugh, a weird, broken sound. “I don’t know. I just didn’t.”

The pain at the back of Mike’s neck strains, and he shifts onto his side, using his elbow as a pillow. “Can you come down here?” he asks Will, who awkwardly straightens his legs and lies flat on the ground, his nose to the sky and hands nervously folded on his chest.

They lie there like that for a bit, Mike drifting in and out of several different trains of thought, none particularly important or relevant to the conversation, as he watches Will laboriously work some large, unwieldy thought into words, his forehead scrunched and throat jumping when he takes sharp intakes of breath as if about to speak.

Eventually, he does: “What if I never do?”

And despite his clouded thoughts, Mike knows it’s useless to feign ignorance, to ask, _ What if you never do what?_, because he knows immediately what Will is trying to ask, the unspoken specificity weighty and defined, like a stone in his hand.

Finally Will turns to look at him, his eyes immediately recognizable, searching and scared and expressive despite the dim campus streetlamps backlighting his face.

“You would really hate me then, huh,” he asks Mike, the cadence off-kitler and flat, stripped of his voice’s usual highs and lows.

There’s a southern, hollow swooping sensation in Mike’s stomach, and the pain in his neck has moved to the crown of his head, like he’s been sitting there with his brow tense for hours though he knows of course he hasn’t. Until that point, he’d mostly been trying to zero in on his thoughts amid a clutter of wandering tasks and musings — homework, Holly’s impending birthday, the dull clamor of the party below them. Now, things seem to clatter to the floor of his brain with alarming clarity, like an upturned drawer of silverware, and the only thing in front of him is Will, and the anxious way he’s cracking his overworked knuckles, thumb across pointer finger, and the jarring, annoying absurdity of his question. Mike almost feels mad at him, that he should even have to answer it.

“I would never hate you,” Mike says, and immediately hates the sharp edge to his voice.

Will glances at him a moment longer, then turns back to the sky. “I know,” he says, though the flippant clip of his words suggests otherwise. “Sorry.”

“No, that’s —” Mike scrubs a hand over his face, biting back more defensiveness, _ Don’t be stupid, Will_. He sits up. “I’m serious. Dead serious.” He looks at Will until the other boy meets his gaze, guarded and unreadable.

“I would never, ever hate you,” Mike tells him, a sobering emphasis on each word. 

Something passes over Will and his expression twists, a blur of confusion and incredulity and something else before it settles into something flatter. Redness rises in his face and a few tears stream out of the corners of his eyes and into the grass, though his face remains otherwise composed — a kind of practiced mask that Will has perfected in the past few years, a clear sign to Mike that they’re approaching something painful and deep that Will can’t or won’t talk about yet.

Will rubs at his eyes and pulls the water off of his temples with flat palms, letting loose a wet chuckle. “Ugh, this is why I don’t drink,” he laughs hoarsely, and Mike is at least smart enough to stay quiet, to not remind Will that he hadn’t really had much to drink at all.


	2. torture

Will wakes up face-down on a pink-sheeted bed with his socks still on and fatigue roaring somewhere behind his eyes. He rises slowly, blinking one eye at a time and flexing his fingers. Mike shifts next to him, resolutely buried, the covers up past his shoulders and a tumble of black hair sticking up from his pillow. Grayish light filters in through Nancy’s living room window, illuminating the crease marks on Mike’s face and his crumpled sweater at the foot of the bed and the wobbly shadow-reflections of a minefield of discarded clear plastic cups.

Will brushes the hair out of his eyes and stretches, transitioning from bed to floor softly, though he’s known Mike to sleep through thunderstorms, movie marathons, and his parents’ heated arguments.

He’s woken up in the same bed as Mike a thousand times before, but it’s been a while. And there’s a weird fragility to it today, an almost manic edge to Will’s movements as he pulls his jeans back over his boxers, his sweatshirt back over his undershirt. He’d slept fitfully, analyzing his own movements and positioning so starkly that he’d felt like a specimen trapped under glass. Nearly everything felt embarrassing or ostentatious, his arms and knees too close to Mike’s or too self-consciously far away, his breathing too loud or too girly-soft. He’d felt raw and exposed after their conversation outside of the party, like he’d scooped out some of his insides and left them there on the lawn for any passersby to see — roommates trotting to the dining hall and stopping, noses scrunched, to remark at how odd his innards were. How queer.

He’d spent a good chunk of the night sitting up, alert, blue dawn creeping in through the window next to the Murphy bed, and thinking of the nights when he was teetering between twelve and thirteen and he hadn’t yet been able to put the Mind Flayer into words. It came to him at night before it ever struck during the day — he’d be in the middle of sleep and suddenly it was like he’d fallen into a bottomless nightmare, the cold and black all-consuming. His lungs would freeze and struggle, as if immediately remembering the days he’d spent in the Upside Down, fighting for breath. The ashy void of the place would buzz and tumble and seem to invade him, filling his eyes and mouth and ears and crawling under his fingernails, and in the maybe-dream he’d scream and scream to try and get it out. He’d wake up hoarse, throat sore and Jonathan or Joyce or both curled up on the furniture around him. He’d stumble into school, purplish shadows underneath his eyes and brain flickering between memories, struggling to place what was real and what he’d dreamt. It was really a miracle he’d ever passed the seventh grade.

He’d never been allowed to sleep over at Mike’s back then, with Joyce still desperate to place him at all times, but Mike had come over whenever he could. And a few times, after Will woke up choking and rattled, sleep-desperate and winding down from a scream, Mike had been there, a hand squeezing his, murmuring sincerely: _ Hey, hey, it’s okay. You’re here, you’re here, it’s okay._ Mike, who was able to sleep through anything.

It wasn’t like he’d never connected the dots. Everyone had pretty much done it for him, even before his fifth birthday — Lonnie has started in with _ faggot_ and _fairy_ early and often, as if he thought that spitting the words out enough times would make Will absorb their venom. And he had. He’d had a thorough childhood training in What Not to Be, What Not to Do. Masculinity 101: Blending In for Queers. That was how he’d shot his first gun (seven), seen his first porno magazine (ten), tasted his first beer (nine). And he’d been an eager student, too, completely sold on his father's assertion that normality was a thing bought with social currency. If he walked this way, talked that way, put the crayons down and tried out a few less _swishy_ interests. And still, none of it had stuck. And he’d followed his friends’ eye-lines when they looked at girls, and felt nothing. And he’d danced with girls, and felt nothing. Even kissed a girl — Aileen Gardner, fifth grade, he’d gone home and cried until he thought he was going to puke — and felt nothing. Never said a word about any of it to anyone. Practicing his right to remain silent, especially (and this was the worst part) because around thirteen he’d begun to notice moments when he _did_ feel something, and it was all wrong. Completely against his training. Heat rising in his face during gym, shirts vs. skins. Stammered words after history, soft-voiced Taylor Owens suddenly five inches taller than him and asking him to borrow his notes. Steve fucking Harrington, of all people, bringing him his homework in the hospital, sweeping his hair out of his eyes while he spoke to Jonathan in hushed tones. And Will felt awful even when he knew he should feel happy; Mike slinging a reassuring arm over his shoulder, touching his hand, delivering a rousing speech, communicating paragraphs in knowing looks.

He’d blamed it on the Mind Flayer initially, this growing resentment toward his best friend. A grim, suffocating dread bloomed in his chest, and it was the Mind Flayer and it wasn’t, because it stayed there and flipped and shoved and tore itself apart long after the creature had unwound itself from Will. Every time Mike ran off with El, hands clasped and laughing, it was like Will blinked and he was there again, in the Upside Down, where nothing made sense and it was his world but it wasn’t, and everything was desolate grey.

He’d told Joyce about it just a few months ago, because he’d been genuinely worried that the connection was back, that he really _was_seeing into that other world again.

_ Does this happen with anybody else?_ She’d asked. _Does it happen with Lucas, or Max, or Dustin?_

Will had just blankly shaken his head, and something in his mom’s face had changed, a kind sort of shiny-eyed crumpling, like a heavy weight had come off of her back and been replaced by something else. She’d hugged him tight, his chin practically resting on top of her head.

_It’s gonna be okay,_ she’d murmured to him then. _You’re real. You’re here._ And he’d felt reassured, though he hadn’t really known what she meant at all.

After they got home from the party, Will had sat on that pink, plush guest bed in the middle of Manhattan, Mike snoring contentedly beside him, and thought of the warmth and surety of Mike’s hand on his, and the way he’d looked, too serious despite his drunkenness, when he’d stared down at him and told him _ I would never hate you._ And though it was this embarrassing mosaic of thoughts that had kept Will up so late, shame propelling him through exhaustion, it was those same thoughts that had eventually coaxed him to sleep: light and childhood simplicity and Mike.

In the morning, in Manhattan, Will wakes up next to Mike and realizes, with rib-clenching dread, that now he knows what Joyce meant.

  


Mike rises slowly, pink blankets still clutched possessively to his chest, and fixes a bleary eye on Will as he laces up his shoe.

“Going already?” he murmurs.

Will glances up at him but looks down again quickly, though his voice is cheerful when he says, “Morning. How’s your head?”

Mike groans, left eye still scrunched shut.

Will chuckles. “There’s aspirin on the coffee table.”

Mike rubs at his face with the sheet. He’s wearing a Talking Heads shirt that might be Will’s, or even likelier Jonathan’s by way of Will. So much of his stuff is mixed up in Mike’s stuff that it happens practically all the time, their clothes switched or backpacks teeming with shared books, notebooks half-filled with Mike’s handwriting and half-filled with Will’s. The T-shirt might be more of a question mark if Mike listened to any good music and the shirt hadn’t been just slightly too small.

Will stands, backpack over one shoulder, and faces Mike. There’s a nervous lilt to his stance, a subtle shift from one foot to the other, like he could take off at a run at any moment.

Mike rubs more sleep from his eyes. His head is fucking pounding and the beer was _not_ worth it. 

“Do you have to go already? We could get food.”

Will frowns. “Yeah, sorry. Jonathan called. Said he really wants me to meet him for lunch.”

Mike nods.

“We can meet later, though? There’s this movie screening he wants to take me to tonight, maybe, you know, I don’t know. Could be fun.” The words trip out of Will’s mouth.

Mike is tempted to point out that he’s babbling, because when has Will ever _babbled_, but he lets it drop. Decides to ignore the tension in the air around them for what feels like the millionth time. He’s suddenly grumpy — unsure when things flipped back to weird between them and unsure how to make them un-weird again.

“Okay, yeah, have fun,” Mike says, ruffling the back of his hair. He already has an insane case of bed head, one side basically vertical while the other curls away from his face, and the added tousling makes a chunk in the back poof straight out. Will fights a grin, the corners of his mouth dimpling with effort.

Mike raises his eyebrows. “Oh, I’m sorry, do you not appreciate my hairstyle right now?”

Will laughs. “Oh, no, trust me, I appreciate it.”

Mike flicks a piece out of his eyes. “Because this is how they’re wearing it in Paris right now.”

“I bet.”

“It’s New York, you know, most fashionable city in the world. I’m just trying to stay on trend.”

Will grins in earnest. He’s stopped shifting his feet. There’s still a sarcastic tilt to his eyebrows, but when he tells Mike, “You look great, really,” it comes out direct and sincere.

Mike smiles back at Will, and things are nice for just another second before the weirdness creeps back in, and then Mike wants to scream because he doesn’t know why it keeps _happening_ or how to make it _stop already_. But Will is still smiling, and there’s a pleased little bit of color to his cheeks, and Mike has a fleeting, horrifying thought that maybe the nervous atmosphere is coming entirely from himself.

He pastes his smile in place, arms crossed over his band T-shirt. “Anyway, yeah, let’s meet up later. Just let me know when and where.”

Will nods. “Cool.” His secondhand Chuck Taylors squeak a bit on the shiny hardwood floor as he leaves, and when he shuts the door Mike feels strange again, an ineffable discomfort settling in the space where Will was standing, the glass of water he left on Mike’s nightstand, the neat little corners of his already-made half of the bed.

  


—

  


When Will gets to the diner, Jonathan is already sitting down at a booth, black coffee in hand. He stands to hug Will with a soft _ Good morning_, his familiar corduroy jacket still vaguely smelling of smoke and woods and Indiana home.

They scan the menu and make stilted small talk, Will noncommittally answering questions about the Barnard party and Jonathan hedging about what he’d gotten up to the night before. Their waiter, a jolly-looking guy in shiny dress shoes, pen behind the ear, asks them if they’re ready to order, and Jonathan tells him that actually they’re still waiting on someone.

“We are?” Will asks as the waiter trots off to get him a coffee.

“Yeah,” Jonathan nods. “Oh, actually —” 

Jonathan waves to someone at the door, and Will twists around to see a guy scampering toward them, light sweat at his temples and patch-ridden jean jacket over his arm.

The guy is skinny, especially around the waist, his black turtleneck sweater tucked into a pair of black dress pants held up by a too-big belt, nearly a foot of leather strap hanging out of one of the loops. A ring of keys jangles against his hip as he walks, his worn Doc Martens landing heavy on the streaky diner linoleum. Part punk, part theatre kid, all bony fingers and bright smile and slim shoulders. He has chestnut-brown hair faded up the sides and a hoop earring in one ear and chipped green nail polish on his nails, and Will has never been so immediately terrified of and taken by another person in one glance.

This feeling grows exponentially when the guy leans into Jonathan’s side of the booth and kisses him on the lips, sliding in next to him with a _Hey babe_ before he extends a hand to Will.

“Good morning, little Byers!” the thin-waisted man crows. “I’ve heard so much about you.”

Will blinks and shakes his hand reflexively, but his eyes barely leave Jonathan, who, though a delicate shade of scarlet, is clearly pleased to be in the company of their new guest. He sits shoulder to shoulder with the other guy, stealing glances at him constantly, their eyes meeting in a series of tiny, wordless conversations while Will tries desperately to figure out what is going on.

“Um,” he stutters, eyes darting between them. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but what the fuck?”

Skinny-waisted guy slaps a hand against the table and laughs, throwing his coiffed head back. “Oh, man, I like him already,” he says to Jonathan, his voice slightly high-pitched and lilting, a comforting, feminine quality to it.

Jonathan grins nervously and indicates the other guy with a tilt of his head. “Uh, yeah, this is Teddy,” — he raises his eyebrows and widens his eyes, like, _ I know, right?_ — “my boyfriend.”

Teddy bares his teeth at Will in an ironic smile. “Pleasure.”

Will is still short-circuiting. “Uh —” He quickly scans the restaurant for dirty looks or cries of protest and is astounded to find nothing. If anybody saw or heard Jonathan, they don’t seem to care. “Uh, since when?”

“Few months now,” Jonathan says, looking back at Teddy, who nods. “We’re in Philosophy of Art together, and he picked a fight with me the first week of class.”

Teddy laughs, rolls his eyes. “He said that the photographic eye is inherently more authoritative than that of the subject, and I was like," he cups his hands around his mouth, "_boooooringggg_ .” Jonathan shrugs, like, _ Yeah, pretty much_. “Anyway, I asked him to continue the conversation over coffee, and the rest is history.”

Will stares at Jonathan. Same stringy hair, same world-weary eyes, same big brother. “But, so youre, like,” Will swallows, like the word is going to choke him, and he realizes, suddenly, that it’s the first time he’s ever going to say it out loud — “gay now?”

The waiter chooses that exact moment to return, like a spectre of Will’s anxiety swooping down from the rafters to punish him for speaking the unspeakable. Will nearly jumps out of his skin.

Except the waiter is still chummy and fair haired, placing Will’s coffee in front of him and extracting the pen from behind his ear to take their orders with a smile. And nothing has changed — nothing around them, anyway, nothing outside of Will — and nobody is charging up to beat the shit out of them, though Will keeps glancing around because _how can that possibly be true_, Lonnie’s voice playing back in his head like a demonic mixtape, _ Of course kids pick on you at school if you’re not gonna make an effort, kid. You gotta learn not to be so...different._

The waiter leaves, and Teddy steals a sip of Jonathan’s coffee. Jonathan has his arm draped across the back of the booth, and Teddy leans into it, and Will gapes at them, the ease of it, the intimacy. He thinks of all the ways he’s beat himself up for merely _looking_. It seems incomprehensible.

“I don’t really know, to answer your question,” Jonathan says, handing Teddy a packet of sugar. “I’m still figuring it out.”

“So Nancy was like — I mean, was that all fake, or…?”

Jonathan shrugs. “It wasn’t _ fake_,” he replies, “but it wasn’t, like, I don’t know. It didn’t feel as right, most of the time.”

Will nods, brow furrowed, like Jonathan is explaining the theory of relativity.

“It’s like, I loved Nancy, but also maybe she’s the last girl I’m ever going to date.” He fiddles with the wrapper on his straw, textured brownish plastic cup of water collecting condensation. “Does that make sense?”

“Yeah, I think so.”

“I still can’t believe you were the weirdo high school loner who stole the beautiful smart girl from her beautiful popular boyfriend,” Teddy laughs. “It’s very camp of you.”

A thought hits Will with a jolt. “Does Mom know?”

Jonathan nods, and Will is so shocked he might just fall right out of his booth, onto the vaguely sticky floor. 

“I called her last week to ask if Teddy could stay at ours for Thanksgiving,” Jonathan says.

Will’s heart is absolutely fucking _pounding _when he asks, “And? What did she say?”

Jonathan looks at Will sympathetically. “She said she can’t wait to meet him.”

Teddy smiles softly, places his hand over Jonathan’s on the table. “Yes, well, I am delightful.”

Will hates himself for it, but he’s tearing up, an overwhelming flood of anxiety and relief and shock crashing over him all at once. Jonathan touches his wrist with his free hand, a delicate gesture that reminds Will of a childhood time when his brother had tried to teach him to use a camera.

“I wanted to tell you because, you know, you’re my brother, and we tell each other everything,” Jonathan says, “but I also wanted you to _ see_. I want you to see that I’m happy, and I’m okay. That everything is okay.”

Teddy looks kindly at Will, too, the three of them connected across the table by touch, and it’s obvious to Will that they’re doing this because they _know_, they know that Will is _like them_, but it’s strangely okay — lovely, even. Something slots into place inside of him, and he feels warm and at home. He thinks, with alarming clarity, how he’ll probably always remember the tiny details of this moment: the crumpled straw wrappers by their drinks, the pink triangle pin on Teddy’s jacket, the Patsy Cline wafting in over the restaurant speakers.

“I love you, Jonathan,” Will tells him.

Jonathan squeezes his hand. “I love you, too, buddy.”

Teddy glances between them both with wide eyes, free hand over his heart. “Oh my _God_. I love your family.”

  


Their food arrives, and the three of them talk and laugh and steal fries from each other. Will has so many questions, some of which he asks in hushed tones, heat rising in his face —

(“Are you guys, like — you know — on the news, I heard in New York it’s really bad, and they’re saying it’s basically a death sentence —”

“Yeah, buddy, we’re being safe. We’re okay, don’t worry about us.”

“Do you know anybody who…?”

“Yeah. We do.”)

— but Jonathan and Teddy speak to him kindly and generously, Teddy a darkly humorous foil to Jonathan’s chronic sincerity. After two slices of cheesecake, Will finally runs out of questions, and he feels full and happy and mentally clear for probably the first time ever. He feels like he could take a nap for the next ten years.

But then Teddy leans across the table. “So, the thing is, we hear you’re having boy trouble,” he stage whispers, and suddenly Will feels like he’s going to barf.

Jonathan shoots Teddy a warning glance. “What?!” Teddy asks, hands up. “That’s what you said!”

“That is _not _what I said,” Jonathan tells Will, whose posture has gone rigid, his eyes defensive and mouth tensed in a straight line.

“Then what did you say?” Will asks.

“He said you’re tying yourself up in knots over your best friend, what’s his name,” Teddy snaps his fingers, trying to remember.

“Mike,” Will supplies hollowly.

“Yes! Mike!” Teddy exclaims, and Jonathan kicks him sharply under the table. “Jesus, _ow_, what?” Teddy glances between Will and Jonathan, both looking at him with tense-faced horror.

“Oh my _ God_, come on, you should talk about it,” Teddy groans. He turns to Will and adds, “if you want to, I mean. I’m just saying, if I’d had a faggy older brother I could talk to when _ I_ had a crush on my straight best friend in high school, it would have changed my _ life_.”

“I told you, we don’t know that he’s straight,” Jonathan says to Teddy, and Will whips his head around, because, _ What?_

Teddy rolls his eyes. “Ugh, they all are.”

“You’re projecting.”

“Wait,” Will interrupts, hands flat on the table. “What do you mean we don’t know that Mike is straight?”

Jonathan and Teddy share a glance, and then Teddy looks at Will sympathetically.

“I mean, you know,” Jonathan hedges. “You guys just have, like, a really intense friendship.”

Will looks like he’s back in fifth grade, right after seeing _ Poltergeist_ with their mom. Same terrified expression. “We do?”

“Yeah, bud. Do you have that kind of relationship with Dustin, or Max, or El, or Lucas?”

Will reels back. “Have you been talking about me with Mom?”

Jonathan’s eyebrows scrunch up. “What? No.”

Cold dread sweeps over Will. This answer is, somehow, worse. He puts his head in his hands. “Oh my God, so I’m actually just that obvious.”

There’s a brief lull, Jonathan and Teddy exchanging more wordless dialogue before Jonathan turns back to Will. Speaking softly, he says, “So you do like him, then.”

Will groans, head still planted in his hands. “_ Ugh,_ I don’t know. I just really started thinking about it _ this morning_.” He spreads his fingers, gesturing frustratedly, like he’s trying to grab at something that isn’t there. “Mike is probably the stupidest person I’ve ever met. But he’s also, like…”

He doesn’t finish the sentence, just sort of lets it hang there. Jonathan and Teddy both nod like they understand, and Teddy says, “Oh, honey,” a hand over his heart.

“But, so, I mean, you guys thinking that Mike could — because of our friendship, I mean,” Will sputters, “like — it’s probably just all me. _I’m _probably the one making it, like, you know —” he gestures vaguely, rolling his wrist.

Teddy placed a hand flat on the table between them. “Will,” he says. “Do you _ ask_ him to hold your hand and pull you close when you’re panicking? Do you _ ask_ him to make sure you’re okay all the time? Do you know _ why_ he broke up with his girlfriend?” Will is back to looking stricken, and Jonathan kicks Teddy under the table again. “Oh my _ God_, I’m just saying!”

Jonathan rolls his eyes. “I thought you thought he was straight.”

The supercut of Mike memories in the back of Will’s brain re-edits itself, and suddenly he’s hit with moment after moment of Mike’s hands on his, his arm around his shoulders, his protective stance at school, Will waking up from a nightmare to find Mike’s arm thrown across his chest. Will feels like he forgot how to breathe.

Teddy throws his hands up. “Well, Jesus, we all need a little hope in our lives, don’t we?”

  


—

  


Nancy drags herself out of her room about an hour after Mike gets up. He’s in jeans and a long-sleeved AV Club shirt, knees up on the counter as he roots through her cupboards for food. He snags a box of cereal and pops it open, still seated on the counter, his bare feet smacking against the wooden cabinets as he swings his legs up and down.

“Aren’t you, like, six feet tall now?” Nancy asks.

“Couldn’t reach that far back,” Mike mumbles around a mouthful of Cap’n Crunch.

Nancy frowns and turns toward the bathroom, her bathrobe slung over her shoulder. A cry of “Nance, wait!” makes her return to the kitchen, eyebrows impatiently raised.

Mike is a little red in the face, and he just stares at her for a second before he blurts out, “Do you know anybody who’s gay?”

The force of Nancy’s confusion nearly knocks her on her ass. Her whole face scrunches up. “Do I _ what_?”

“Do you know anybody who’s gay?”

The lines on her forehead deepen. “_ Why_?”

Mike throws his hands up, a small shower of cereal raining down onto the floor. His words come out a mile a minute: “Oh my God, Nancy, no reason, Jesus, I’m not going to call the police on you if you do, it’s just a fucking question, like I know Mom and Dad both want to blow Reagan, but jeez, I didn’t think you’d be so uptight.”

“I’m not _ uptight_,” Nancy shouts over him, “I just don’t know why you would ask me that question first thing in the morning!”

“One, it’s noon.” Mike folds his arms. “And two, I can’t tell you why.”

“Okay, great, then I don’t have to tell you an answer.” She moves back toward the bathroom.

Mike lets out a choked sound, like he’s dying. “Okay, _ FINE!_” he puts his hands out in a “stop” motion. “I have a friend who I think, I don’t know, might be. So.”

Eyebrow raise. “You have a _ friend_.”

“Yes.”

Nancy crosses the room and perches on one of the stools at the breakfast bar across from Mike, her pink bathrobe tossed onto the matching stool to her left. She folds her hands in front of her and regards Mike with distinctly Karen-esque concern.

“Mike, I thought we weren’t going to keep secrets from each other anymore.”

Mike’s posture stiffens.

“If there’s anything you want to tell me, you know, I just want you to know that I’m not going to judge you, or think of you any differently, and I’m _ definitely _not going to tell Mom or Dad.”

Mike looks to the left, then to the right, as if scanning the room for a team of _ Candid Camera_ producers. “Uh, wait, you think I’m talking about _ me_?”

Nancy’s posture goes rigid, too. “Uh.”

“Because I’m not. I’m not.”

She nods. “Okay.”

“Seriously, I wasn’t talking about myself.”

“I said okay.”

“I was talking about somebody else.”

Nancy sighs. “Okay, who?”

Mike sighs, too, dropping his hands into his lap and staring off into the middle distance, as if about to ask the stove if it can believe this shit.

“Will,” he tells her finally.

Nancy blinks. “Oh.”

“‘Oh’?” Mike makes a flailing gesture at her, palms up. “What, ‘oh’?”

Nancy cocks her head, weighing her words. “I just…I thought you already knew.”

Mike stares at her _ hard_, brows drawn close together, for several silent seconds. “You thought I already knew what?”

Nancy returns the look of confusion. “That Will is gay.”

“What?”

“_Oh _my God,” Nancy closes her left hand over her eyes. “This is like ‘Who’s on First,’ but worse.”

“So what, it’s like _ known fact _that Will is gay?” Mike plows on. “Since when? Who told you that? Who told you that?”

“Nobody, really, but you know, Hawkins is small, people talk—”

“Oh, so because a bunch of idiots call Will a fag it must be true.”

“That’s not what I’m saying!” Nancy snaps, flinching. “And Jesus, Mike, don’t say that.”

Mike’s posture remains defensive, arms recrossed, mouth tensed. “Then what are you saying?”

“That, yeah, lots of people are awful about it, but lots of people back home who _ aren’t _ awful thought so, too, like Steve, and Jonathan, and _ Robin_. I think I even overheard Mrs. Byers and Jonathan talking about it, once, when she didn’t know I was there. And, yeah, he’s also really sensitive and I’ve barely ever even seen him look at a girl, so, I don’t know, I guess I just thought you all had figured the same thing and just decided that it was fine.”

She lays her hands flat on the table, like a lawyer done presenting evidence. Mike stares at her like he’s just been knocked on the head.

“I don’t get why you’re so shocked,” Nancy says after a too-long pause. “I thought we were having this conversation in the first place because you thought so, too.”

“‘I think Will might be, you know’ —”

“Gay,” Nancy supplies for him.

“— and ‘I basically _ know _ he is because I heard a _ lesbian _ and his _ mom _talking about it’ are two completely different things. They’re completely different!”

“Okay, so what?” Nancy throws her hands up. “Does it make you feel any differently about him?”

“I —” Mike gapes, floundering for words. “I don’t know,” he says into his lap irksomely, rubbing at his forehead.

Nancy sighs and dismounts from her stool, hopping up on the counter next to him.

“So the thing is,” she says, “like, half the girls at Barnard are lesbians, and half the guys in New York City are gay.”

The look Mike gives her nearly sends Nancy into an ill-timed giggle fit. He looks like Steve trying to solve a basic math equation.

“Yeah, and I think Barb kinda had something like that going on, too, so. Yeah, I know gay people.”

Mike blinks. “And what, uh — what do you think. About it.”

“Aaaaahhhh…” Nancy hedges, grabbing the Cap’n Crunch box from Mike’s side. “You promise you won’t tell Mom and Dad?”

Mike nods.

“I’ve kissed a few girls since I got here, so.” She pops a puffed rice ball into her mouth. Mike’s ass nearly slips off the countertop, and he stumbles to stay upright on the granite. Nancy soldiers on: “It’s not like I _ get it _ one hundred percent, I would say, but it’s like, I don’t know, some girls like girls, some guys like guys, some people like both, some people are just figuring it out, it’s like.” She shrugs. “Who cares?”

“What was it like?”

Nancy readies a grossed-out comment, but finds Mike’s questioning gaze to be so disarmingly sincere — maybe afraid? — that she answers honestly.

“It was nice. I don’t know if it’ll lead to anything else, but, yeah.” She shrugs.

Mike nods seriously as he absorbs this. This is, Nancy realizes, perhaps the quietest he’s ever been during one of their conversations.

“How do you feel about Will being gay?” she asks him gently.

Mike picks at the lint on his shirt. “I dunno,” he mutters. He looks back at her. “Scared, I guess?”

“Scared why?”

“Because I want him to be okay.”

“Oh, Mike.” Nancy frowns. “I know Dad is probably, like, talking about how homosexuals are all miserable and dying over mom’s meatloaf, but like, come on, it’s 1987. Not everybody thinks like them, and you don’t have to either.”

Mike _ hmm_s.

Nancy nudges his shoulder with her own. “Come on, I can practically hear all the gears in your head turning. Talk to me.”

Mike pushes himself off of the counter and makes himself busy, opening cabinets until he finds Nancy’s glasses and poking through the bottles in her fridge. Finally, as he unscrews the cap on some orange juice, he asks: “Uh, when you kissed other girls. How did you know if you did or didn’t like them?” — He widens his eyes — “Like, _ like _them.”

“The same way I know if I like a guy. I just know.”

Mike rolls his glass between his palms. “And have you ever liked another girl?”

Nancy tilts her head. “No. I don’t think so.”

Mike nods to himself.

“Why, have you ever liked another boy?”

The phone rings, and Mike jumps and drops the glass. He leaps back, crying, “Shit, shit, shit!” as it shatters neatly against the linoleum.

Nancy maneuvers around the mess in her slippers and grabs her broom from the closet next to the bathroom. Mike reaches out to take it from her, and she yanks it out of reach.

“Answer the phone,” she commands. “You don’t have shoes on.”

Mike gingerly pads over to the phone and yanks it off the hook, still a little out of breath as he answers, “Hello?”

“Oh, hey, you’re up!”

Mike feels, acutely, like he’s going to puke. “Hey, Will.”

He makes desperate eye contact with Nancy, who stares back at him with eyes so wide they practically swallow her entire face.

“Hey, what’s up? You okay?”

“What? Oh —” Mike shakes his head a bit, side to side, in an attempt to clear it. “Yeah, no, I’m fine, just, like you said, sleepy. What’s up?”

“Well, so Jonathan still wants to go see that movie screening thing tonight, and I told him you might want to come, or that I’d invite you, anyway, so. Here I am.”

Mike hears some sharp whispering on the other line, though he can’t make out the words exchanged. “Who’s that?” he asks.

“That,” Will responds, words a bit choked off, like he’s grinding his teeth, “is no one.” In a too-loud whisper, he commands someone to _ Get out of here _before addressing Mike again. “So, the Waverly? 9 p.m.? You in?”

Mike scribbles something out on the prim stationery set hanging next to the phone, then hangs up as Nancy deposits the shards of glass into her trash can.

“Hey, Nance,” Mike says, tapping his pen against the pad of paper thoughtfully. “Have you ever heard of _ The Rocky Horror Picture Show_?”

**Author's Note:**

> title [from here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0zcVEaAua0).


End file.
